Big changes for professors

Often lampooned nationally as coddled academics not facing demands of the real world, professors find themselves buffeted from all sides: • A long-awaited retirement wave could finally be starting after many professors delayed departures because of the financial crash starting in 2008. At UC, Miami University and Cincinnati State Technical & Community College, requests are up 50 percent compared to 2008-09. • Colleges are using more part-time faculty, up to 41.3 percent of all instructional staff, the American Association of University Professors says. That’s up 72 percent since 1975, while the use of full-time professors on a track for tenure, the lifetime appointment that professors covet, has plummeted 87 percent. • In Ohio, professors have to deal with changes in the state’s State Teachers Retirement System, which includes about 5,200 professors from the three biggest public colleges here. As a group, they make the system less lucrative for those retiring after this summer, so professors are retiring before they take full effect. • Professors confront new accountability as students and legislators demand documented proof of what students are learning before getting a degree. • Online courses have revolutionized the way teachers teach, swelling enrollments but minimizing the impact of face-to-face interactions.

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The Enquirer this year is looking at the sustainability of a college system where tuition, student debt and costs all are increasing, leading to fears that higher education could be the nation’s next economic bubble to burst.

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Rick Paul just retired as a professor at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and wonders whether he would pick the same job again.

“I wouldn’t come into it,” said Paul, 69, who started at UC in 1977. “I would rather go into industry and take the lower level of security for higher pay. ... I don’t know. I would have to think hard about that.”

Budget cuts, technology advances and a flood of part-time instructors have eroded the career path that professors have followed for decades: Build a teaching or research portfolio, get tenure and reap the benefits for yourself and the university.

The next several years are a critical juncture for faculty at universities throughout Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky, facing a faculty turnover when one generation of professors will retire – and a younger, cheaper, more tech-savvy and entrepreneurial faculty will take over.

The impact extends far beyond any individual professor to the sustainability of a higher education system that is struggling to stay affordable.

As tuition and student debt increase and the ability of families to pay falters, the nation’s universities could be facing a financial reckoning akin to the Internet and housing bubbles of the last two decades.

The next generation of academics faces the stark reality that colleges are holding the lid on faculty costs along with other expenses in an effort to keep tuition affordable, leading to an influx of part-time teachers, online options and other changes.

One of these younger professors is Jonathan Thomas, 38, who is starting his fourth year at Northern Kentucky University.

“It’s also the hardest job I’ve ever had,” Thomas said. “With the autonomy we have as professors, I can pursue the research I want to pursue.”

Another young teacher, Abbey Yee of Cincinnati State Technical & Community College, said she entered the profession because she couldn’t find any jobs in industry that excited her.

Yee teaches mechanical engineering technology and knows she probably could make more money elsewhere, but after three years she now considers teaching a career.

“There’s kind of that click that happens (with students) that is pretty powerful at times and pretty motivating,” she said.

Creating 'a faculty that is set up for the 21st century'

As Paul ends his career and Thomas and Yee grow into theirs, the role of the university professor becomes more volatile every year, casting doubt on the reliable career path Paul and his generation enjoyed.

More faculty are retiring. Paul is among an estimated one-quarter of UC’s full-time professors expected to retire in the next half-dozen years. At NKU, 26 percent of full-time faculty are 60 or older and another 27 percent are in their 50s.

Turnover in the faculty, experts say, provides the rare opportunity for both financial and academic flexibility.

“One of the most critical budgetary decisions at any university is what to do with those faculty lines,” said Dewayne Matthews, vice president of strategy and policy at the Lumina Foundation, an Indianapolis-based education policy group. “There’s an enormous impact for not just budgets and resources, but for the strategic direction of the institution.”

The impact will be dramatic, both to the financial bottom line and the final educational product delivered to their students.

“If you do it well,” said Richard Harknett, political science professor and former chairman of the UC faculty, “you create a faculty that is set up for the 21st century.”

Despite retirement wave, some are still hanging on

For at least a decade, higher ed observers have been predicting a “retirement wave” as professors hired in the booms of the late 1970s and early 1980s completed their careers.

There have been spikes in retirements, including this year and last year. At UC, Cincinnati State and Miami University, requests are up 50 percent compared to 2008-09.

But many older faculty members are holding on. Some also delayed retirements in 2009 and 2010 after their accounts were devastated by the financial crash.

Nearly three-quarters of faculty age 50 and older say they’ll delay retirement past age 65, or never retire at all, a new Fidelity Investments survey shows.

Northern Kentucky University physics professor Chuck Hawkins, who is retiring this summer, remembers meeting with his financial adviser in 2007.

“They told me if I lived until 90, I’d have plenty to live on and have a million and a half to leave to my kids,” said Hawkins, 71, of Fort Thomas. “Well, it’s not going to work out that way.”

Hawkins said the generational turnover is healthy.

“On the financial side, a person like me retiring, that frees up some money for, I don’t know, one and a half new faculty?” he said. “These people they’re hiring are gung-ho, they have a lot of energy, they do good research.”

UC’s Paul, in the molecular and cellular physiology department, said he just decided it was time.

Tenure track isn't viewed positively by everyone

Xavier University Provost Scott Chadwick said the transformation of higher education to new types of teaching should be a lure to professors of all ages.

For those who stay, financial pressures and technology advances have altered the job. Many say they’re viewed as a commodity, merely a delivery system for a product.

And the influx of part-time faculty – up to 41 percent of all instructional staff – is one of the industry’s biggest long-term trends.

“It’s the more fundamental question of what kinds of faculty members are out there,” said John Curtis, director of research and public policy at the American Association of University Professors in Washington, D.C. “It really has distracted from the ability of faculty members to develop a career, and we would argue it hurts the education for students.”

Not everybody sees it that way. UC’s Harknett says he gets about 75 applications for every tenure-track opening in political science. Even those outside the coveted tenure track say it’s still a good job.

“I feel very lucky,” said Elissa Yancey, who teaches journalism full-time at UC but is not eligible for tenure. She’s called an “educator associate professor.”

Yancey said her practical experience at the local Internet site Soapbox Media, which she continues outside the classroom, helps her students in a way that even the most advanced research projects don’t.

“(Tenure) doesn’t necessarily fit the needs of today’s students or of today’s faculty. I think there needs to be a healthy mix,” she said.

Even for tenure-track professors, there are new pressures to increase “credit hour productivity” – academy-speak for teaching more tuition-paying students in the same number of courses. At UC, NKU and other universities, those metrics are tracked every term.

“I think it means increasing levels of accountability and increasing levels of financial mindfulness,” said Larry Johnson, former interim UC provost and dean of the College of Education, Criminal Justice and Human Services. “Increasingly, you’re going to have to demonstrate the return on investment.” ■